


Learned Behavior

by lullabelle



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Gen, Mild Gore, Original Character(s), The Author Regrets Everything
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-06
Updated: 2014-01-06
Packaged: 2018-01-07 17:39:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 894
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1122588
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lullabelle/pseuds/lullabelle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Charlie takes down a teenage vampire, which sounds like it came straight out of a YA novel, but she doesn't exactly feel like the protagonist.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Learned Behavior

As a kid, Charlie hadn't been much of a talker. You probably wouldn't believe it if you met her now, but really, she'd been kind of quiet. She'd liked books, and computers, and she had some friends who were pretty cool, but she usually let them do the actual conversing. Charlie'd been pretty content just to listen. But then she ran away, and she'd quickly found that being too silent could make you the subject of suspicion, especially if you were an unaccompanied minor. If she talked, and talked a lot, people were a lot less likely to catch on to the fact she was hiding things -- big things. Often it was assumed that Charlie was ditzy, or dim, from the way she managed to run her mouth about nothing important. It was far from the truth, but the assumption worked to her advantage a lot of the time, so she learned to swallow her pride about it. For her talking was a behavior that, once learned, came as naturally as breathing.

But this time, it was the talking that made things hard.

She wasn't sure if it was because the vampire was so new, or maybe because he was pumped up on adrenaline, but he shook off the dead man's blood much quicker than she expected. She'd barely gotten a compress on her neck (and yup, he'd grazed her with his terror-enducing spikey mouth hole, just before she managed to stick him with the syringe, a close call that she couldn't really dwell on right now, but would no doubt freak her out later) before he was stirring. The carpet, saturated with the blood of his incredibly sloppy kill, squelched wetly beneath him as he tried to rise. "You gon' kill me?" he slurred.

Charlie whipped her head around to look at him and -- oh. Oh, hell. The vampire in question couldn't be more than fifteen years old. The living room they were in was dark, lit only by the light filtering through the open door from the kitchen, and between the dim light and the fact that his features had been distorted by bloodlust, she hadn't gotten a good look at his face. The vampire still had baby fat in his cheeks, and freckles across his nose.

"Um. Maybe?"

The kid tried a second time to sit up, but evidently the dead man's blood was still having some of its desired effect. "Could you, y'know, _not_ kill me?"

Charlie really, really wanted to say no. "I don't really see how," she said apologetically. She took the piece of gauze away from her neck and put it in her pocket for later. The injury wasn't that bad, and she wanted her hands free.

"I didn't want to hurt anyone. I couldn't stop myself." His speech was a little clearer now, for all his voice broke. His fangs had retracted.

Charlie sighed. "I believe you. But that's kind of the problem. You _can't_ stop yourself." And this, right here, was the moment that she should have stopped talking and ended it, because every moment she engaged was just going to make it harder for both of them. It was kinda like how naming farm animals made it harder to actually eat them. Except that this was a person, a teenager, not an animal, and Charlie coudn't believe she actually just thought that.

"But I can stop _now_. Now that I've fed, the edge is gone. It'll be hard, but -- " There was an ever-growing panic in the kid's voice and Charlie's stomach flipped. The gore didn't bother her too much, but just a little begging and her stomach was threatening pyrotechnics.

" _Please._ I have a math test on monday. I won't hurt anyone else. I know it won't be easy but I can do it, I know I can. My-- my dad has his seven year chip."

For a second Charlie considered it. She couldn't help it. She'd read all of Carver Edlund's books, and there had been a clan of vampire's who'd managed to get themselves off the sauce, for a while anyway. It _might_ be possible...

The headlights of a passing car momentarily lit the room through the closed blinds, drawing Charlie's attention to a gold coin on the fireplace mantle. It was embossed with a fancy design, and the number "7". For the first time, Charlie took a good look at the dead man on the floor. He was probably just shy of forty, with the kind of deep lines around his eyes that came from hard living, and a familiar smattering of freckles across his nose. His throat had been completely torn out, and the arterial spray had projected his blood halfway across the room.

She reached into her messenger bag and closed her hand around the handle of her new machete. She'd never used it before, bought it just for this.

"Yeah," she said. "Maybe." She took a deep breath.

It took three blows to separate the kid's head from his neck. She'd been crying by the second one landed, but she didn't hurl once.

When the deed was done, she took a step back to look at what she'd wrought. Her first successful hunt. What a crock of shit. Hunting was nothing like she'd thought it would be.

And, yeah. This wasn't something she'd ever want to talk about.


End file.
